Spent at least an hour trying to mount an smb shared from my Debian server to 10.6.+ OSX laptop (I have no idea what kind of feline name it carries, nor I care enough for Apple to figure it out).

As always the best answer comes from Ubuntu forums where a dude mentioned that certain tweaks need to be done to the samba server configuration. Namely, password encryption has to be enabled (even for ‘share’ level of security)

encrypt passwords = true

Apparently, Apple doesn’t give a shit about its users (as usual, I suspect) to ever mention the little fact that OSX SMB client can’t work with SMB server where password encryption isn’t enabled. No help, no web information, no nothing… While producing a pretty good yet overpriced hardware for their laptops there’s still much to do to make the software better. Having cool iPhone features added to the PC OS doesn’t make it any better, I guess.